He rolled his eyes. “Cliché alert.”

The waitress came by with the check. I made feeble motions toward my handbag, but Brandon shook his head and pulled out his wallet.

“I’ll get the next one,” I offered, though I knew he wouldn’t let me. Brandon did things like hold open doors and pull out chairs and pay for dinners. He also had the ability to engineer a type of smile that I knew was just for me. The Amy-smile. It was intoxicating. And I knew if I let myself fall for him, I’d crash like a four-fold stinger.

“Look, we’ve talked about this.” I slipped my arms back into my coat. “You’re one of my best friends, and I’m afraid that if I get involved with you, and it doesn’t work out, I’ll lose that.”

Brandon signed his name across the receipt in a frustrated scrawl. “Amy,” he said slowly, not looking up. “We are involved. And it’s not working out.”

“You know what I mean.” I ducked my head.

He sighed. “Let’s get out of here.” We stood, and headed to the door, but before we got to the pink plaster Buddha at the entrance, he turned to me and looked me square in the eye. “Just promise me one thing. Just once in your life, just for kicks, don’t overthink, okay? See how it goes.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Brandon walked me back to my dorm entryway, and I, in defiance of the promise I’d just made, brainstormed ways to leave him at the door of my suite without hurting his feelings.

Which, as it turns out, was unnecessary. The door to my suite stood open, and Lydia sat on the couch inside our common room. She still wore her jacket, her lap was full of books, and she was staring fixedly at a small, square piece of paper sitting in the middle of the floor.

“Lydia?” I said, waving a hand in front of her face. “Are you all right?”

She didn’t look up at me, didn’t even blink, just whispered, “It’s yours.”

Brandon furrowed his brow and swiped the paper off the floor. “Sure is,” he said, handing me a small white envelope edged in glossy black and sealed with a dollop of dark wax. “They must have slipped it under the door.”

I turned the envelope over in my hands. It was made of heavy, luxurious linen paper, and my name had been printed on the front in an odd, angular font.

But it was the back that truly held my interest, for into the solid black wax was pressed the unmistakable imprint of a rose inside an elongated hexagon.

The seal of Rose & Grave.

I stuffed the envelope into my jacket pocket quicker than a jock with a cheat sheet, and then turned to my friends.

“So Quill came through after all?” Brandon said with a wry smile.

“Quill & Ink,” Lydia said in that same strange, flat voice, “gives out blue-and-silver edged envelopes.”

Brandon and I exchanged looks at Lydia’s display of society obsession. “So who gives out black ones?” he asked her.

Lydia’s eyes met mine, but she said nothing, and I knew then that she’d gotten a very good look at that seal. If she was knowledgeable about random society-stationery factoids, then she sure as hell knew what that seal meant.

I turned to Brandon. “Thanks so much for dinner. I wish I could hang out more, but it’s getting late, and I have a lot of work to do tonight—”

“No way.” He crossed his arms over his sweatshirt and planted his feet on my parquet. “Not until I get to see that envelope again.”

Lydia appeared to have finally found her tongue, for she leapt to her feet and began ushering him out the door. “The lady says she’s busy, Weare,” she said, crowding up on him. “And much as we both like you, that means out. Now.”

“But—” Brandon said, looking over his shoulder at me as Lydia hustled him out. I would have spoken up about the way she was manhandling my—well, my friend-with-bennies—but my mind was too busy doing round-off back handsprings and I was caressing that wax seal in my pocket like I was Frodo and it was the One Ring.

“Good night, Brandon!” I called as Lydia shoved him over the threshold and shut the door in his face. “I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise!”

She threw the lock and turned to me. “Open it.”

I drew back, protecting my pocket. “In front of you?”

“I’m your best friend!” she argued.

I snorted. “You’ve been pulling a disappearing act all week! You won’t tell me a thing about your society interview, and yet you think you get dibs on reading my letter?”

She thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yes!”

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” I put my hands on my hips, realizing even as I did that I was leaving the envelope wide open for pickpockets.

“Fine,” Lydia said, stepping back. “Be that way. I’ll leave you alone with your precious envelope.” And then she turned, walked into her room, and shut the door, leaving me blinking at her whiteboard in surprise.

That’s not how I expected that to go at all. But I recovered a few seconds later, remembering that I still hadn’t opened the envelope.

I spent a good long time just staring at the seal. Would it crack when I opened it? I turned the paper over and over in my hands. Yep, that was my name, and yep, that was the Rose & Grave seal. And that was still my name.

But Rose & Grave did not tap women.

What the hell was going on?

Finally, I carefully slipped my fingertips beneath the wax and popped it open in one piece. The envelope split on irregular lines, and unfolded into an odd, distorted hexagon. The words were written on the diagonal in a heavy, angular script, and this is what they said:

B. S. C.[2]  Amy Maureen Haskel:

You have been judged and found worthy. Be in your room tonight at five minutes past eight o’clock and await further instructions.

And then beneath that was the mark of Rose & Grave.

I was being tapped by Rose & Grave!

Oh wow. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. (As missives go, it wasn’t too groundbreaking, but at the time I was over the moon.)

I ran toward Lydia’s bedroom, then skidded to a stop. Wait a second, I wasn’t going to tell her anything until she shared with me.

Brandon! I bet he’d be back to his room by now. I could call—No, he’d just finished telling me how Paleolithic he thought secret societies were, and Rose & Grave was the undisputed T-Rex of the country. They were old school and blue blood and their pedigreed members grew up to be Supreme Court Justices and CEOs and founders of major media conglomerates like AOL Time-Warner. Male ones.

Could all of those rumors be wrong? Or worse, could this be someone’s idea of a sick joke? Poor little Amy Haskel, didn’t get an election, let’s mess with her head. Such things had been known to happen before—of course, they tended to happen to gullible freshmen who didn’t know any better. Every few years you heard stories about college pranksters dressing up in robes, kidnapping a gaggle of frosh, and putting them through all manner of humiliations in the guise of “initiation.”

But really, wouldn’t it be just as easy to fool an upper-classman? It wasn’t as if I could ask a bunch of black-robed figures for ID when they showed up. As that Shadow-Who-Smiles guy had said to me at the interview, that’s why they called it secret.

I stabbed my hands into my hair in frustration. Why was there no information session on this? Why wasn’t it covered in the student handbook? Why had the paranoid corner of my brain hog-tied and gagged the rational part?

Okay, Amy, think. Think. I checked my watch, and amended my mantra. Think quicker. I had ten minutes before the boys in black arrived.

Should I accept? Should I accept, even if I suspected this was nothing but a mean prank—because what if this was Rose & Grave? And if this invitation was what it appeared to be, what would membership in the society mean to me?

I was still considering this nine and a half minutes later, when there was a knock on my door. I froze, clutching the envelope tightly in my hands and staring at the door as if it were the only thing standing between me and Armageddon.